


Daemon Meme - Battlefield Terra AU

by Asuka Kureru (Askerian)



Series: Daemon AUs [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Ficlet, Implied Torture, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-07 14:12:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/749416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fusion with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials/the Golden Compass. Daemons are animal-shaped external manifestations of a person's inner self and soul.<br/>--<br/>A collection of ficlets exploring what might have gone differently in Battlefield Terra if the trolls, or the humans, or both had daemons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Trolls have Daemons, humans don't : BT chapter 2

**Author's Note:**

> => Trolls have daemons, humans don't: how chapter 2 of BT might have gone.
> 
> I'll try to do one where humans have daemons and trolls don't, and maybe one where they both do, but no promises.

"Ah," the Doc had said, careless, "don't forget the pet."

John wouldn't, even if she hadn't told him. He remembers the cockpit, he remembers the alien's stark, soul-deep terror when John started dragging him out of the cockpit, _nononodon'tforgetherno I'lldoanythingplease_.

He remembers how it tingled, when he cupped his hand under a limp little beast's belly, how much deeper they --

He doesn't forget the pet.

His alien boy is stretched out insensible on a bed. In the far corner there's a wire cage like at the vet's, padlocked, and inside there's a curled up animal, not quite cat-sized, with a short, fat-jowled muzzle and long back legs like a dwarf rabbit and short quills peeking out of its iron-gray fur, a fluffy trailing tail ending in mace spines.

It's shuddering, like it's cold. Its eyes are vague, half-open but unseeing. John taps on the bars; no reaction.

Last time he touched it, on the island, they freaked out, the alien and his pet both.

He twists the thin bars open, pushes his hand inside. Offers his fingers to be smelled, but there's no reaction.

"Well at least dog and cat stink don't bug you, that's good. Umm."

He trails his fingertip up the hedgebunny's forehead; its little nose twitches, it whiskers flip up a bit. John smiles and strokes up its back, down its far side, pulls it closer.

It shudders under his hand but it allows the handling, not like last time at all. It feels all empty, too exhausted for terror. John extracts it from the cage and drapes it on his shoulder like Rose and Roxy do their cats, and gets to freeing the alien.

He's a bit careless getting him off the examination table and they end up sitting on the floor, the hedgebunny tumbled limply into John's lap, and the alien's eyes blink, turn to the little beast like for once he's seeing her.

He'd love giving it back to the alien, but the dude's hands won't keep a hold for crap and the hospital gown doesn't make for a good sling. "Does it have a name? Yeah, you'll tell me later, okay, how am I going to, hm. We're not forgetting her, see, I'm just putting her in my shirt. She better not burrow in my gut meat or anything!"

He looks pregnant now. Hehe. It tickles and prickles both, this is going to be distracting. Oh well.

Okay, now that the guards have had time to take place outside, they should make their escape.

This is going to be interesting.

\--

They're back home by the time he can finally dig the hedgebunny out of his shirt. His stomach is scored with scratches and needle-thin punctures and little blood smears, though most of the holes are closed already; the animal better not be venomous. In the end he has to awkwardly kneel up beside the limply sitting form of the alien and pull the bottom of his shirt out of his belt; he manages to catch her with one hand before she tumbles down too hard.

It looks dead. He lowers it onto the alien's lap, brow knit; aw, shit.

The alien's breath hitches. Shit, shit.

"Uh -- I'm sure it's fine!" he tells him, and flips the animal onto her other flank so he can touch her soft, quill-less belly and check she's still breathing.

The alien starts crying -- big, wet, horrible sobs, and he curls up around the beast in his lap, hands crawling up to cup her, and John sits with his hand trapped there. It's so awkward, it's horrible. Did he kill her or something -- fall on her, maybe, when Jade dumped them out of Remington's hand? Was she so unhealthy that the stress finished her off? Aw, hell. John's free hand finds its way to the alien's back, pats awkwardly. His throat feels a little tight. He remembers how much the alien boy needed her, was terrified of John forgetting her, leaving her behind.

"Crap. I'm -- I'm sorry. I'm sorry, okay, no, stop crying, we'll get you a bunny? Aw, man."

He doesn't even get why he's so sad. It's just a pet, it's nothing, it's...

The little fluffbelly expands in his hand, just barely.

John sits beside the alien, an arm around his back, and doesn't say anything when the alien turns to lean on him and soak his shirt in hot tears and his prickly little pet weakly burrows between their sides.

They both have their hands on her back, fingers overlapping some, so that no hint of fur can be seen.

"Yeah," he promises quietly. "I'll keep you guys safe."


	2. 8 years pre-BT, Bro & Noir

The intruders are good.

Bro knows because half of Noir's men are dead, daemons burst into sparks, and the rest is crippled, and they only killed three of the intruders right back.

Bro is running full tilt through high warehouses, following the tug of his bond. His daemon has them in sight, and he pulls high, straining not to lose them in the canyons of high metal walls and narrow paths.

Bro doesn't care if Osprey-Bro pulls himself half out of his heart in the process, and neither does Osprey-Bro.

They're going to the docks, a less used part of them, and the gall of it would make him hiss if he were in anything but hunting mode. He catches up on the rearguard, slices a throat; sparks burst, another man turns.

Someone snipes him down. Bro blinks, and leaps over the corpse. Osprey-Bro sends him the flash of a man in a black suit on the roof. Good then, he'll take the left, they might be able to trap them in a few corners.

They do, pincer attack against a group of seven men (The second of them carries a suspicious cloth bag). They're almost to the docks now, warehouses back and right, a flight of stairs in front, a straight fall into the sea on the right. Bro throws himself into the fight, whirling low -- leaving one of his knives in the back of someone's thigh, blood spurting hard, breaking a neck; another two men fall, shot from the shadows and then it's a melee. Noir can't shoot toward the man with the bag; he wades in, knives out, small black terrier catching a cobra by the back of the neck and holding on as it lashes at him.

Bro doesn't see what happens next, too busy with a dude who knows a bit too much Krav Maga for his peace of mind, but then there's a yelp and the shadow at his back falters. The black terrier has been flung off to the edge of the path, hindquarters over the edge, and there's at least ten meters below that; it might not sever them, but it will hurt so badly -- the distance alone, and then the rocks underneath.

Bro knows they're good, knows they've been trained well, because the closest man doesn't even hesitate before he brings down his heel on Slick's scrabbling front paw.

Bro is closer, so he dives -- Osprey-Bro dives too, slashes at eyes that he barely misses and then Bro's heel is crushing the enemy's trachea in and Osprey-Bro has his talons in a furry little back and is flapping desperately to pull the terrier up.

He can't.

Bro doesn't even think before he's grabbing a furry black scruff and rolling, holding a small dog to his chest, and then Noir shoots the last man in the head and --

They can't pause here and Noir isn't swooning or anything and there's a yell underneath; Bro runs.

Slick's paw smears blood all over his chest, he couldn't run on his own, this is why -- this is why.

When they get to the docks they see a slim child methodically freeing herself from a cloth bag, and on the ground there are a twitching, purple-faced, daemonless man and an intensely rust-red snake, one that slithers back to the girl so she can lift and drape it around her neck.

"I don't think Astarte will be changing anymore," Rose says thoughtfully, fingers trailing down the snake's long mahogany tail.

She's ten year old. It's not unheard of. When she starts crying -- big silent gasps -- Bro hands Noir his daemon back and picks her up instead, and carries her back home.

There are going to be so much snarling later on, and so much cockblocking and violence, he knows that; and he knows Noir will say it was about getting him stuck with the cleanup (as is his job) and not about how natural, how unobtrusive his hands felt on Slick's thick fur at all.

Osprey-Bro flies sentinel over their heads and doesn't say anything about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jack Noir's daemon is a Scottish Terrier called Slick; Rose's is a Coastal Taipan, one of the most venomous snakes in the world. Her poison would take at least a half-hour to drop a human being, but a small daemon has much less mass to get at.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ==> Both humans and trolls have daemons - end of BT chpt.3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Talk of consent issues/dubcon situations.
> 
> BTW, Jake's Curie is a Maned Wolf. They look like foxes on stilts and are neither foxes nor wolves.

"C'mon, climb up. Yeah, that's good."

John smiles at Karkat, shoos him good-humored up the ladder and then a little farther away so John can climb in too. Under them Jake and Curie are dead asleep, Jake with his arms flung out until one hangs off the side and Curie tucked against his side on her back, ridiculously long legs pointing straight up, fluffy fox tail draped across his thigh.

John perches on hands and one knee, half on his bunk; Aiolos lands on his shoulder, then hops to the head of the bed where he always perches over John's head, and they look at each other across the length of the mattress, chuckling half-guilty.

"Dad will sooo frown at us," John's daemon says, and hunkers down, feathers fluffing comfortably.

Karkat looks super uncomfortable though, sitting against the wall like that, and for a second John wonders why. ... Oh, right, welp. Karkat's daemon is still sitting in the middle of the floor, in the puddle of weak moonlight that the cracked-open window lets through. She's staring up, whiskers flicking but otherwise not moving, and for a second as John looks down at her he wonders if he should find her a piece of cardboard to use as a ramp. She looks tired stupid, so exhausted she can't even think through a solution of her own, and Karkat apparently didn't even think of picking her up. He doesn't think a bunny-hedgehog can climb a vertical ladder!

Before he can convince himself to climb back down and find something to use as a land-bound-daemon elevator, she leaps.

Her claws scrabble on the plank supposed to keep John from rolling overboard, and then Karkat is leaning in and catching her under her butt and she's hopping the rest of the way in.

"Success!" Aiolos teases with a quiet, half-asleep cheep. "Kulira the Olympic bunny."

Karkat's hand is bleeding from her quills, and when he sits back against the wall he does it a bit fast, and then he hugs his knees.

Kulira's long mace-tail is swishing in a way that comes across more as a cat's annoyance than as a dog's friendliness, and she bristles all over as she crouches between John and Karkat and stares at him.

John... stares back. Huh?

Okay, this is a pretty big area she's claiming that way, he's not gonna be able to lay down, or maybe only if he squeezes in really tight against the guardrail. He's had to put his hands on her twice already -- once while pulling her and Karkat out of their cockpit, since Karkat was too weak to hold onto her and kept falling unconscious and she would have fallen right off when she went unconscious along with him, and once when escaping from the labs. That one wasn't too long, a mere second to transfer her to the T-shirt he'd stuffed Karkat in, but still. He is so not touching her again if he has any choice at all, he knows he didn't have a choice before and he feels skeevy anyway.

Aiolos lands on the mattress beside him and tilts his head in confusion, hops closer. Kulira _growls_ , a short, surprisingly deep sound. Karkat catches her by the flanks and drags her on his lap, curls up around her, whispers something in her long ear. He sounds all strangled, choked up.

"... Karkat?"

John leans in on hands and knees, tilts his head in open bafflement. It looks like he's -- huh.

John touches his shoulder cautiously. Karkat doesn't move; Kulira flinches.

"Oh," says Aiolos. "Um."

Karkat drags in a shuddery breath, eyes closed, and then he lays down against the wall on his back. His knees are up and he's still hugging his daemon high against his chest, so her head comes to nestle under his chin. The outer side of his hand is smeared in red from when he held her up by the quills.

Oh.

Shit.

It's dark enough to sleep in here, even though they always leave a gap in the blinds for Dirk's daemon to come in if he ever feels like it, but it's never dark enough to be blind, and John is still wearing his glasses, and they compensate for low light automatically. His alien boy is frightened.

There's only John and Aiolos here. Oh, did he fuck up.

"No, no no no no no, it's not -- I --" He leans forward to touch Karkat's shoulder, gets pecked by his own daemon, and shit, right, he's leaning over him on all fours yeah wow real smart there. He retreats to the foot of the bed, wincing. "No, Karkat, it's not -- I didn't bring you here for -- oh _hell_."

How does he even explain it? How the hell do you mime 'your chastity is utterly safe in my bed'?

For a short, panicked moment he almost messages Rose to ask her just that, but by the time she gives him a suggestion it'll have dragged on and become this huge friggin' circus, argh, no, he needs to fix this by himself _right now_ and uh, uhhhh, _how?_

When he looks back up at Karkat again, the alien has his head off the mattress and is blinking at him. His eyes look kind of _way_ too wet, but he looks almost more puzzled than freaked out. Well, okay, still mostly freaked out, but confused too. Good! Awesome. Now John can deconfuse him

Um.

He looks away, grimacing, embarrassed. "Could you, like... sit up." He makes gestures but he's not sure if Karkat gets them at all. He's still watching though. Good. "Aiolos? Suggestions?"

The bedroom door opens without warning. John doesn't know if he's mortified or relieved. The way Karkat jerks, though, the way Kulira briefly curls up in a ball of spines...

"Okay, Egbert, what are you doing still up," Dave whispers at him, frowning.

Bowie takes flight from his shoulder and lands on the guardrail, dark beady eye gleaming at them all.

"No, what are _you_ doing in here, it's not anywhere near your bedtime--"

"So were we like interrupting something," Bowie caws, laughing -- she's always laughing, especially when Dave isn't. "Instructive shit."

Dave perches on the bottom rung and peers at the scene. John winces, and then just... breathes out. Loosens his shoulders. Out of his hands now. It's almost a relief.

"Okay, everyone out of the bedroom."

"Wh--"

Bowie pecks Aiolos in the head. Ow. " _Out_." Her head swivels to stare at the alien and his hedgebunny. "You too."

John allows himself to be hauled to the ladder, drops to the floor. He waits in the middle of the room, arms around himself. Dave is staring at Karkat, but he can't see Karkat from here, only the back of Dave's head and he knows Dave isn't too happy with sharing their home with the enemy.

In the end Dave points at Karkat, points down, and hops off the ladder. They wait for a couple of seconds before Karkat cautiously peeks over the edge.

Dave shoves John toward the door. John goes meekly. He hears a "Go back to sleep, Jake," and then Karkat emerges from the bedroom after him, still cradling his daemon, and then Dave, with Bowie flying out over their heads to go peck the corridor lights on.

Karkat winces when the lights turn on, eyes flicking from Dave to John and back in utter confusion. Dave lets out a heavy sigh and turns to John.

"You know we were kidding about that boldly groping where no human has groped before shit, right?" he says, a bit too calmly.

John's fists clench; Aiolos' crest stands up. "Dave, what the _fuck_ \-- how could you think I'd --"

"Be a total dumbass?"

"... Mnrgh." He deflates, winces. "I just wanted to share the bed, is all." He waves toward Karkat, who... it's really starting to bug him that he's in that stupid hospital thing still, legs bare and all. "Now how do we...?"

Dave sighs. "First things first we get away from the bedroom. Come on."

He points at Karkat and at the other end of the corridor. The communicating door to his dad and Doctor Lalonde's rooms is there; it startles John a bit that Dave actually pushes it open.

They have a small sitting... waiting-room-looking space, before their actual bedrooms, with a low table and chairs and a coffee machine. Bowie stares at Karkat and his daemon and then, pointedly, at one of the padded chairs. John flops in another, leaving an empty seat between them, and Dave closes the door behind him and sits on the table itself.

"So," Bowie says after they've spent a minute or so staring at each other in awkward silence. "He thought you wanted an alien-shaped body pillow."

"Ngh."

"With fleshlight included."

"Oh my god, why are you so gross."

Aiolos takes flight to go peck three-times-as-big Bowie in the head. Bowie whacks him with a wing. Karkat breathes in deep, bracing, and then he growls.

It's not words this time, John's pretty sure, just an irritated, exhausted, fed-up growl. The two bird daemons immediately land on John and Dave's knees.

"Good,"" Dave says smoothly, "now tell us how you really feel."

John leans in and punches Dave in the shoulder. "Can you actually _help_ or something?! Suggestions? Ideas? Anything?"

Bowie starts preening her wing, pretend-uninterested. "I hear mime is in favor this season."

John glares at her. "Augh."

Karkat kicks the coffee table. Pretty hard; Dave presses a hand on the surface to balance himself. They're both staring at him. Buried in his seat like a sullen high school student, the alien glares at them both equally. Kulira hops out of his hold and lands on the table and _stomps_. It makes a pretty sharp slapping noise.

He says something that's probably "I am totally fed up with the both of you what the fuck." If that's not it, John is sure it's close enough for government work.

John turns to him, hands open, palms up. He doesn't know if it means anything to him. "Karkat..."

Karkat growls something back that is likely a _what_ , and ruins the angry effect a bit when he has to rub hard at his eye with the heel of his hand. Maybe he's tired, maybe it's gritty. (Maybe he was about to cry not too long ago. Maybe that.)

"Okay, mime," Dave says. "Let's start with the basics."

"The basics?"

Aiolos cheeps. "Point and grunt? -- ugh, not grunt, don't grunt, whatever you do don't grunt. Point and... grimace?"

"Iiii... was thinking _yes and no_... But if you insist."

"Oh, shut up."

Dave smirks, just a bit. "No." And then he reaches for John's shoulder; he pauses there, hand hovering over his skin. John blinks. "Can I touch your shoulder?"

"Uh -- yes?"

Dave touches it, but Bowie is snorting, so John must have missed someth--oh.

"Okay. Dave, can I touch your... nose?"

He is poised ready to bop it, hand hovering, starting to smile despite himself.

Dave, predictably, says "No. Can I touch your nose?"

"Yeah, sure -- ow, no need to flick it."

"Yes or no answers, John, for god's sake. Can I touch your nose?"

John rubs his nose, glowers. "No."

"Okay." Dave takes his hand back, a little exaggerated. Bowie takes over.

"Aiolos, can I preen your crest?"

John's daemon watches Dave's with a jaundiced eye and leans out of reach of her waiting beak. "No. No, also, _no_ , I will peck you, and no."

Karkat is watching them, blinking slowly. On the edge of the table, his daemon stretches her neck to sniff at the two birds, though she's still far from getting into reach.

"Okay, someone needs to teach him yes," Dave says with a sigh, and reaches for John's arm. "Can I touch your arm?"

John snickers. His ears are a bit red. "Yes. Ooh Mister Strider. Touch me more." Dave arches an eyebrow. "I'm serious!" Dave shrugs; his hand starts to migrate from John's upper arm to his collarbone. "Yes... Yes... Stop."

Dave of course is a smart guy; he takes his hand off immediately, makes a show of leaning back, hands up. "Okay."

And around it goes a few more times. Yes, no, stop, no, stop, yes, until John can't help chortling at how ridiculous their little play is.

Karkat is tracking them, and his permanent frown has smoothed almost all the way out, his jaw has relaxed; Kulira's quills are mostly down. Aiolos hops closer to her, eyes her long ears with his beak pointing the way. "Kulira, can I touch your ears?"

They hesitate, less than a second. "... No."

They're tense like even now they expect to be punished for using a word they were taught, but of course Aiolos just says "Okay!" and flits away.

John smiles at Karkat, who swallows like his throat is a bit tight. "Touch," he says, and makes his hand stroke the air a couple of inches over Karkat's knee. "Yes, no, yeeees _stop_. C'mon, repeat."

He does; his yeses come out like yissses instead and his stops don't seem to have a vowel in them but he has 'no' down cold. Every time he's a little more confident; John thinks he even caught the start of a smile there, before Karkat ducked his head and hid it.

"Karkat? Can I touch you?"

"... No. No."

"Okay." It's like a ritual now. Question, answer, okay. The rhythm is almost soothing.

He repeats "touch" a few times, miming it, and then "kiss" while pointing at his lips and making kissy noises; the way Karkat snorts but doesn't look confused, they probably do it too. (Thinking of it, when John had to kiss him to get the nanomachines in him, he was freaked out but did not seem confused at all.) "Kiss, yes no stop," Karkat mutters to himself.

"Hug," John demonstrates a sideway one, on Dave, who lets him get away with it for five seconds before dropping a blasé "Stop." "Karkat, can I hug you?"

Karkat leans back, though the jaundiced way he looks at John is almost -- almost like he's playing along with the joke. " _No_. Zhann no hug no."

"I think that means he doesn't trust your cooties vaccination."

"Haha, fuck you."

Okay. Now the last thing to -- oh, Kulira is hopping her way to Bowie. Huh. Bowie is a pretty big crow -- a rook technically but they're basically huge crows, so. And Kulira is pet bunny-sized, so even though they weigh probably roughly the same thing Bowie's head is twice as high.

"Can touch you?" she asks. She makes the sounds much better than Karkat, which is only weird until John remembers that it's not like she's really making sounds with her actual mouth anyway.

Karkat has gone all tense, though he doesn't stop his daemon; he's watching the scene with bright, sharp eyes, like he's testing for something John doesn't see.

Bowie, of course, just shrugs her wings and bows her head closer. "Yes?"

But Kulira draws back, says "No." She's hunkered down like she's ready to jump back, to race off.

John sees Karkat's toes clenched on the edge of the table and wonders if he's strong enough to flip it with Dave on top of it. At the very least he could shove it off.

Bowie just shrugs and starts preening again. "Sure, okay."

Okay, what was that about... Oh well. John turns back to Karkat, and finds him already staring.

His eyes are really _super_ red. Dave's eyes are red too but they don't look half that intense. Maybe it's the gold sclera.

(Maybe it's because when he takes off his visor Dave spends his time squinting and blinking like an owl lost at high noon, but yeah.)

"Zhann," Karkat says, and falters. He breathes in, leans out of his seat, forces his hand to reach out. "Zhann, touch...?"

Wow, okay, he is so nervous. _So_ nervous. "No," John says, and startles himself with how gentle it comes out. "Karkat?"

"Hn?" He alternates between glaring at John almost, and looking away, like he can't hold his eyes.

"Karkat. Touch." He mimes. "Kiss." Kissy noises. "Hug. Okay?"

"Mnh?"

John's cheeks are heating up. He looks down at Kulira; she's watching him too, one ear warily flattened back, one tilted up and out some, like an antenna trying to find a signal. She's horridly cute as daemons go.

He points at his own crotch. At Karkat's crotch. Makes himself say, "Sex." (He is so thankful that Dave doesn't crack jokes about sex ed, or tries to make sex noises. _So_ thankful.)

Karkat and Kulira are entirely still before him. Aiolos lands on his shoulder, pinches the tip of his ear; John breathes out.

"Sex with me, noooo." He doesn't even make that one a question. he leans back, obviously, makes warding gestures with his hands, palms out. "No no, absolutely not. No sex. No. Touch, yes, hug yes, sex _no_."

Dave's lips are quirked up at a single corner. He's amused, the asshole. Karkat stares at him for another heartbeat or three, and then he relaxes in his chair and lets out all his air, all shuddery. "Okay," he even remembers to say. "Okay."

John laughs, nervous and relieved.

They spend a minute or so not-watching Kulira hop back in Karkat's lap and whisper to him, nose to nose -- friggin' adorable thing that they're totally not witnessing, nope.

Then once Karkat is good and relaxed Dave leans in to Karkat, eyebrows quirked mock-seductively. "Sex with John, no. What about sex with me? Yes, I know it's yes."

"Dave!" John shrieks, and thwaps him in the shoulder. Dave puts his hand in John's face to shove him back.

"Shh, let him say what he really thinks. Hmmm? Karkat. Kaaarkat."

Karkat stares at him like Dave has gone crazy. "Ehh. Reshst 'nkh no."

"... I get the feeling you just got burned."

Dave's lower lip juts out. John laughs at him. They start a shoving match. Karkat watches them, curled up in his comfy armchair around his daemon, feet on the edge of his chair; his face is full of 'I can't believe that much stupid', but from time to time he'll close his eyes and shudder and hold his daemon just a tiny bit tighter and look a little less tense.

It lasts until Bowie flies back in and divebombs them. John has to jerk back, but she wasn't even aiming for him; she veers up right before Karkat, dropping something right on top of Kulira.

"Oh my little Jesus, _thank you_."

John and Aiolos blink at Dave, busy trailing a finger down Bowie's back, and then at Karkat and his package.

... It's...

"...It's a pair of briefs."

It's still in its plastic package, and besides Bowie can't fly too far, so John knows where it's from; his father's room. He always buys a ton in advance and never opens them until needed, so it's not _too_ gross, but...

Dave gives him a pitying moue. "John, honeychild. You weren't the one almost catching glimpses of alien cooch past that ridiculous paper bathrobe thing, but you sure were the one having alien bum cheeks rubbed tenderly all over your bedsheets. Now make him put them on, okay?"

"It was supposed to go on my father's butt!" John whimpers, but obediently shows Karkat how to tear the package open. (With those claws he thinks it was more a matter of Karkat not knowing if he was _allowed_ , but.) "Uh, you... you put your legs in here and..."

And Karkat puts a hand on his forehead and shoves him back -- not hard, John mostly goes out of surprise.

"No, Zhann," he says, almost patient, and proves that apparently pants and underpants are pretty universal contraptions, because it takes him all of two seconds to tip his daemon out of his lap, slip his feet in the leg holes, and hike them up to his waist.

He then spends another fifteen seconds settling the waistband just right and rubbing his hands up and down the now clothed outside of his thighs, something almost like a smile hovering on his lips.

John admits this is likely going to help a ton with the incidences of almost-flashing he'd been doing his best to ignore.

Aiolos perches on John's head, and wonders dolefully, "You think maybe we should have started there?"

... Yeah, probably. Can't have helped, feeling the breeze on his privates. John is a dumbass. John is _such_ a dumbass.

"Okay, I think we're done here," Dave says, and climbs off the table, dusts himself off. John turns to Karkat.

"Sleep?" he asks, and mimes resting, eyes closed.

Karkat blinks, looking almost mild, and then hums. "Okay yes."

He turns sideways in his armchair, curls up, feet on the armrest, Kulira hopping to burrow between his chest and his knees, wedging herself there without drawing blood somehow. John blinks.

"Uh, I didn't mean--"

Karkat's eyes are already closed. His face is lined with stress and ten days of pain and exhaustion. He cracks an eye open at John's voice, hums a tired little acknowledgement.

John caves. "Okay, fine, here is good." Sigh. Maybe he can drag that other armchair in and prop his feet... He gets up to do that, so he'll be stretched out on the other side of the table, between Karkat and the rest of the room, the way through to the other rooms his father and Doctor Lalonde might use.

He finds a desk lamp with a high metal strut the light hangs from for Aiolos to perch on, plugs it in, turns it on, sits back down in his seat and tests his setup. Yeah, it'll do, he's had worse.

There's a faint, almost invisible smile on Karkat's lips.

"Can you turn the ceiling light off when you go?" he asks Dave, who is still standing by the door watching them.

"You realize he totally knew you didn't mean here and just played you, right?"

John narrows his eyes at him. "Good _night_ , Dave."

"Yeah, yeah, goodnight. I'll give Mom 'n Dad a heads up." He turns off the light and he and Bowie leave, closing the door behind them.

The desk lamp's light isn't very strong. John leaves it lit; he doesn't want anyone to wake up or walk in not being able to tell straight away where they are.

Of course Karkat played him, but all things considered, he thinks he's okay with it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Battefield Terra, John meeting Gamzee in-person for the first time. Or the scene where John, Gamzee, and Karkat are all hanging around in the hangar immediately after that. Whichever seems more interesting to write.

John knows the look on his face is brittle and wrong and he knows Karkat can tell. He knows the observers can tell, every single camera can pick it up--

JD: john whats wrong?? did they say anything???  
JH: nah! it's just that he's freakishly huge and moves all weird and it's probably even weirder in person! hehe. :B

He sits on the bench in the locker room and presses his hand against Aiolos' back as his jay burrows into the open collar of John’s flight suit. The same way that...

"I don't know why it's even a surprise!" Aiolos chirps, trying for cheerful.

"Yeah," John agrees. "We knew they were in _loooove_. Heh."

It's just...

Gamzee _touched_ Karkat's daemon.

And then Kulira only burrowed under it, that hand so huge it spans the whole of her body, and didn't prickle him even once. Karkat didn't tense, like handing that guy his bare, defenseless soul was no cause for worry...

"...They belong ..." he says, trying to find the shape of something he can only guess. To him? Is it mutual? What if it's not? (Not any of his business if it's not.) _With_ him? No, no, that would mean Karkat would...

... Would leave.

Karkat's going to leave.

He's been deluding himself assuming Karkat and Kulira would just always be here. That huge hand on Kulira's frail back... There's no way this means anything else.


End file.
